With "The Wire" drawing to a close, series creator David Simon is turning his attention to his next TV project: a drama series set in the New Orleans music community.

Reached by phone on the South Africa set of "Generation Kill," an Iraq war miniseries he's executive-producing for HBO, Simon said his pilot script is near completion and awaits the conclusion of the Writers Guild of America strike to be turned in to the network.

But Simon cautioned that the prospective series is still a long way from "Action!"

"I've got no green light," said Simon, who in deference to the WGA strike wouldn't discuss details about the upcoming "Wire" season during the interview. "It's taken me twice as long as I thought it would, and I don't want to (screw) it up because if I (screw) it up, it dies right there, that's the end. Either I write a good pilot or we're done.

"HBO has made no other commitment to me other than being interested in reading it. I don't want to get everybody all wound up (in New Orleans). It's not like we're ready to start hiring crew or anything."

But the prospect of a Simon-penned series about New Orleans, especially in light of the unrealized ambitions of the recent Fox drama "K-Ville," is tantalizing.

Simon, who began work on the project before Hurricane Katrina, said getting it this far has been a daunting task.

"I'm still playing with it, because I'm now at the point where I'm not ashamed to run some of these story lines for the people I've been relying heavily on for research and verisimilitude," he said. "I sat down to write several times and came up with stuff I did not feel was organic enough, or that has enough of the voices that I was trying to capture. The more I went back to New Orleans and the more I talked to some of the people I was talking to, the more comfortable I got to approximating voices.

"Obviously, it's a lot easier for me to write Baltimore," the setting for "The Wire." "I've spent so many years there. The people who will be reading it at HBO may or may not know that certain things are not accurate, or know that I can correct them later .¤.¤. but there's some part of me that has been a little bit intent on convincing myself that I could execute (the script) in such a way that I wouldn't be ashamed of the material.

"I'm really conscious of the fact that New Orleans has this incredibly ornate string of traditions -- musical, oral, architectural, everything. It's incredibly ornate, and for an outsider -- even though I've been coming down there in recent years, I'm still nonetheless an outsider -- I'm trying to figure out what constitutes an unforgivable error.

"None of this is to suggest that we've got this thing in our pocket. It really is intimidating."

HBO commissioned Simon's script based on a verbal pitch -- which included a 20-minute digression to answer a network executive's questions about a Simon reference to Mardi Gras Indians -- for a show based around the city's vernacular culture, but which would also address larger issues about urban life in America.

Simon wants to use the premise "as a way to examine cities, and why cities matter," he said. "From my point of view, having been to most large American cities in my life and having become acquainted with a few of them, they're all valuable. You may not have known it from 'The Wire,' but it was on some level a love letter to Baltimore. A very angry love letter, from somebody who might be a little bit conflicted in their affections, but no way were we arguing that Baltimore could not or should not be saved.

"The one thing that New Orleans offers in making that kind of argument in a narrative form -- what's valuable about New Orleans, (what's) so unique, so unlike anything else the United States -- (is that it's) so visual and musical that it can be depicted and ought to be depicted in such a way that people understand innately what is possible in this city.

"Cities are kind of demonized in television culture, and in a lot of storytelling. We have very idyllic notions about the country and a very conflicted sense of what we are as an urban people. But we are urban people. Americans, the vast majority of us, live in and around large cities. Yet how we feel about them is really sort of ambivalent. I'm fascinated by that."

Simon was hesitant to name all of his research sources for fear of leaving anybody out.

"I better just say, 'a lot of people,'¤" he said. "Whenever I made a phone call and said what I was trying to do, people not only responded, but they were extremely generous with their time. I feel beholden to a lot of people. No matter what angle I came to people with, they would point me in good directions. People were really intent to explain New Orleans. They were really intent to try to explain the inexplicable.

"They're really earnest about it. 'Well, what you have to understand is .¤.¤.' And then 75 minutes later you're still taking notes."

Simon's primary collaborator on the project, Eric Overmyer, a playwright and TV writer who has worked on "Law & Order," "Homicide" and "The Wire," is a part-time New Orleans resident.

Some of Simon's known research sources for the script include New Orleans locals intimate with the music scene -- Kermit Ruffins, members of the Rebirth Brass Band, Donald Harrison Jr., DJ/pianist Davis Rogan -- as well as media members, police and political players.

"David's process consisted of him and I putting more damage on Time Warner's bottom line than the AOL merger," said Rogan, referencing HBO's parent company and its disastrous 2000 merger with the Internet-service provider. "We went to second-lines and some gigs and I introduced him to a lot of the musicians that I know."

Rogan, whose song "Do Me That Way" is on the soundtrack of Sunday's "Wire" season premiere (also there: Ernie K-Doe!), has seen a few pages of Simon's New Orleans script, and said the writer was open to the most niggling kind of fix -- correcting the ward in which a specific second-line would take place, for example.

"I'm a native, fifth generation," Rogan said. "And if I'm vetting the script, I'd like to say that speaks worlds for the show's accuracy.

"He has a real ear for dialogue, which is kind of vital for someone who's going to get New Orleans.

"I live in mortal terror that somebody looks at something I write who's actually living the event and says, 'That's exactly wrong. That guy got it exactly wrong,'¤" Simon said. "I don't want to sell anything to HBO that I can't sell to myself first.

"The best things I've ever seen about New Orleans have been documentaries that have been watched by a handful of people" -- citing Les Blank's 1978 "Always for Pleasure" and Stevenson Palfi's 1982 "Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together," both music docs -- "(not) mass appeal dramas.

"How do you get that in a drama? How can you not want to try? If you've experienced New Orleans at any level, how can you not want to try? I can't think of anything better to try.

"Is there a part of me that thinks this stuff will never make it into a network drama, even on HBO? Yeah. And yet there's a part of me that thinks it's just there. How has it not gotten in yet?

"It's delicate. The more you touch it with something as indelicate as television, it kind of falls apart on you. I'd almost rather it not get on the air than have it get on the air and have it be lame."

Click here
to listen to Baltimore bard David Simon talk via cell phone from Sasolburg, South Africa about a particularly transformative experience at the Funky Butt in New Orleans.